The play by Svetlana Petriychuk “Finist the Bright Falcon”

Svetlana Petriychuk’s provocative, documentary-style play tells the story of a Russian woman who began an online relationship with an Islamic State fighter, and left everything behind as she travelled to join him in IS group-controlled Syria. When she eventually returns to Russia, she is tried as a terrorist. Over the last decade, there have been hundreds of such cases in Russia and other former Soviet republics.

The play, originally performed in Moscow in 2021, attempts to understand what motivated these women’s choices: what is driving them to abandon their lives and for what promise? The play draws heavily on the Russian fairy tale of the same name, in which the heroine Maryushka sacrifices everything to travel to a faraway land in search of her beloved prince.

In 2022, the original stage production of Finist the Bright Falcon was awarded two awards at the Golden Mask festival, the main national theatre prize in Russia. In July 2024, the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and the play’s director Zhenya Berkovich were sentenced to six years in prison on charges that the play “justifyies terrorism.” The charges are widely seen as a politically motivated attack on freedom of expression in Russia.

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